New-Media on Ulitzer

This year we have seen almost every company, every blogger and his duck, feverishly posting their "annual predictions" before the December 31 deadline, as if there is such a deadline, and as if anyone cares about what they think in most cases.

This is followed by a dozen or so 'paid' predictions news releases every day by companies who are pushing their "wish lists from 2010" as "predictions" and hoping that they come true.

If you do a quick Google search on "2010 predictions" you will land on a predictions potpourri of more than 5,000 stories (the last time I looked).

I especially enjoyed Fly Fishing Predictions for 2010, Identity Theft 2010 Predictions, The 2010 NFL Mock Draft Predictions, and Plastic Surgery Predictions for 2010.

You even have the predictions of the "magazine industry" here. What magazine industry? I didn't know dinosaurs made predictions.

When you ignore all of the above, you are left with analyst companies and a few CEOs and/or global political figures.

Well, analyst companies pay their bills by predicting the future, so they may be pros on this subject.

For example, when I first browsed through the predictions published by Yankee Group on Tuesday, what attracted my attention was the word "Telcos" mentioned in two out of their 10 bullets.

8. Enterprise trust lifts telcos to the top of the cloud. Service outages from Amazon, Google and others made clear that many cloud services aren’t yet up to par. Telcos will become trusted intermediaries between disparate cloud environments, offering service delivery, SLAs, federation, orchestration, security and more.

10. Telcos unite behind infrastructure sharing. Led by European trailblazers, sharing of both active and passive network assets will become the de facto business model for efficient telcos in both developed and emerging markets.

Then we saw the news by Orange (Orange Sets Out Its Ambitions in Cloud Computing) this morning, which made me think that Yankee Group maybe up to something there.

Of course, you can always go back to last year and compare the predictions to what really happened, like Intel CEO Paul Otellini is planning to do here.

This applies to official company predictions too, such as last year and this year by this company.

Then of course there are these famous "Cloud Computing" predictions for 2010. Almost 200 of those annual predictions that mention "cloud computing" made it to Google searches in the past 30 days.

SYS-CON predicted 2010 for Cloud Computing four years ago, and launched Cloud Expo in February 2007.

There is an old saying in the Turkish language called "Görünen köy kılavuz istemez" which translates roughly into "Village in sight does not entail a Guide!"

The purpose of a prediction has two components:

1) You better be accurate in you prediction(s), -and-

2) Act on it

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

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